Implementation plan
1. Read five timers against their walls
About an hour shows whether the timers hold spare time.
| Action | - Read the cooling timer on five running jobs.
- Measure the thickest wall of each part, and note its plastic.
- Work out the time each wall needs with the standard cooling formula.
- Set the two times side by side for each job.
|
| Owner | A process technician |
| Purchases | None |
| Decision | Does any timer run past the time its wall needs? |
| Fallback | If none does, stop here: about an hour has been spent. |
2. Trial the longest-running jobs
A second is worth most on the jobs that run the most hours.
| Action | - From the ERP job log, list the jobs by the press hours each ran in twelve months, and take the top five.
- Start with the jobs that need no customer approval.
- With quality, agree the checks for each part: its sizes, its flatness and its look.
- Lower the cooling timer one second, let the press settle, and set aside all the parts of one cycle.
- Check the parts once they are cold. Repeat until a part fails, then go back one second.
|
| Owner | A process technician, with quality and scheduling |
| Purchases | None: about 8 hours of the technician's time per job, about $2,100 in all |
| Decision | Do cold parts still pass at the shorter time? |
| Fallback | If the first step already fails, that timer was right: leave it and go to the next job. |
3. Keep the new time on the settings sheet
Every later run starts from the tested time, not from a safe guess.
| Action | - Write the new cooling time on the job's settings sheet, with the date and who ran the trial.
- At the job's next start, set the timer from the sheet.
- A shift that raises the timer writes down which defect it was fixing.
|
| Owner | The process technician and the shift supervisors |
| Purchases | None |
| Decision | Is the timer still at the tested time at the next run? |
| Fallback | If it has gone back up, find the defect the shift was fixing and trial that job again. |
Illustrative sample. The plant, the walk and the footage are synthetic.